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Projection
What If Our Partner Is Not Responsible for Our Pain?
When we stop blaming others for our wounds, we can start healing them.
Updated July 7, 2023 Reviewed by Lybi Ma
In part one of this series, I discussed two common relationship toxins: projection and defensiveness. Here, in part two, I offer some strategies to break this (often) unconscious cycle that poisons so many relationships.
Projection is a tricky process; it can appear as if our partner is making us feel a certain way—that they are to blame for our bad feelings. But often, if we have the courage to look closely, we can see that certain feelings keep reappearing in us in many different iterations. We may discover that a particular feeling or experience that we’ve been holding our partner responsible for, and convinced our partner is causing, is in fact an ongoing emotional thread-line in our life.
At the end of the day (and the beginning and middle too), the key to change when it comes to projection is one thing: awareness. Awareness as a key to change may sound unexciting and maybe even too passive to mean much. We love action steps in our culture: homework assignments, tasks, affirmations, and the like; to suggest awareness as a strategy may feel like not enough. And yet, self-awareness (which is different than awareness of what our partner is doing to us) remains the most powerful ingredient in creating change.
If awareness is the key, what exactly do we need to become aware of? Ultimately, we must become aware of what’s happening inside ourselves, and mindful of the feelings we keep bumping into in our life, the experiences that feel familiar (and maybe familial as well). We must be willing to examine our own feelings and investigate their origin story: Where and with whom were these feelings born, and how and where did they grow and get reinforced? And furthermore, what are we believing about ourselves, others, and the world when these feelings are present? What are the stories we’re telling ourselves when these feelings arise?
It’s important to start relating to our own experience, particularly those experiences that appear as regular visitors in our life, as life stories to be curious about, to get to know, separate from who or what happens to be activating them right now. At the same time, we need to approach our experience with a sense of friendliness: Huh, here’s that feeling again, that same sense of being humiliated (or whatever the repetitive feeling is); here it is in yet another situation with yet another character causing it. What is this feeling really all about?
Awareness means the willingness to really look at the feelings and narratives that appear consistently in our life. And, to consider that maybe these feelings, which more often than not arose from suffering, are part of us, wired into our nervous system, carried in our heart, and therefore, come with us wherever we go. A recognition too, that these core experiences, because of the deep pain attached to them, can easily get re-activated, and are something we bring the potential for—with us—wherever we go.
Awareness means learning to recognize the lens through which we see the people, places, and things in our life. And, through this recognition, to break the habit of blaming others for the narratives we’ve constructed out of what we’ve lived and suffered.
Keep in mind, investigating and owning our painful feelings is not an invitation to blame ourselves. The fact is, we all carry certain core wounds, painful experiences we were unprepared to process when they happened, experiences that damaged our self-worth. At the same time, we all hold certain negative narratives, stories about ourselves and other people that we constructed from our suffering. Not surprisingly, we carry and hold tightest to those experiences and narratives that are most painful, which also are the ones most easily re-triggered by other people places and things. These are the wounds hardest to see and relate to as separate from who we are, and separate from the Truth.
We bring our core wounds and unhealed experiences into every relationship we enter. We rewrite and relive them over and over again—until we don’t. But no matter how much it looks like another person is making us feel pain, often, that pain is already here inside us, with its painful storylines still believed, intact, and unhealed. Nonetheless, this truth is not a reason to blame or shame ourselves, and thereby create more suffering for ourselves. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Awareness, when it comes to projection, is an opportunity to acknowledge our unhealed emotional wounds, the experiences that hurt us, and to accept them as part of us, and also just a part of being human.
Awareness provides an opportunity not just to acknowledge our core wounds and painful narratives, but also to offer them empathy. In recognizing the rawness, intensity, and weight of certain experiences in our life, we can open the door to self-compassion, a sense of kindness for our suffering, and respect for our own journey. And indeed, awareness and the self-compassion it generates is the only thing that truly soothes and heals our core wounds. Furthermore, it’s what sets us free so we don’t have to keep re-living the same suffering over and over, still believing not only that it’s true, but that it’s being done to us—again.
Other people can cause us suffering, there’s no doubt about that; we need to be able to identify and protect ourselves from hurtful behavior. But breaking free from projection is not about other people’s choices, it’s about taking the focus off of other people and what they’re doing to us, and placing it (kindly) on our own experience, and what’s happening inside us. So too, it’s about breaking the habit of assigning other people responsibility for causing and taking away our suffering.
While identifying other people’s bad behavior may appear as an attempt to protect and take care of ourselves, it’s actually a form of self-abandonment, the opposite of self-care. In making someone else responsible for creating our suffering and simultaneously awarding them the power to take it away, we turn away from and disown our pain. When we can separate our pain from the other person and what they’re doing to us, however, we can start owning our wounds, bringing them into our hearts, and offering ourselves kindness for what we’ve lived. We can welcome the whole story that our suffering contains—our story. Simultaneously, when we stop looking at our partner as the cause and cure for our pain, we can take control of our own experience and assume responsibility and the power to change our own life.
The willingness to look at and accept our wounds is the hard and courageous work that breaks us free from projection. And most importantly, it’s what allows us to finally give ourselves the attention and empathy we so desperately need.
In part three of this series, I will speak to the partner being projected upon, and offer some tips for breaking the cycle from the other side. Stay tuned.
